Baghdad mourners: Iraqis take part in a funeral for two bodyguards of Iraqi deputy health minister Hakim al-Zamili. KARIM KADIM, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Bush will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Jordan next week, days after Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's visit to Tehran this weekend for a summit with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Word of Bush's impending trip came as Iraq and Syria restored diplomatic relations after a 24-year rift, a move Iraq hopes can help stem what it says is Syrian support for militants and encourage other Arab states to rally to its aid.

Bush will fly to Amman after a NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, for talks Nov. 29-30 to focus on "building security and stability in Iraq," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Tuesday.

"We will focus our discussions on current developments in Iraq, progress made to date in the deliberations of a high-level joint committee on transferring security responsibility, and the role of the region in supporting Iraq," Snow said, reading from a joint U.S.-Iraqi statement as Bush flew back to Washington from a trip to Asia.

The ongoing chaos in Iraq has put mounting pressure on both Bush and al-Maliki to try to find a way to stem the violence. U.S. discontent over the handling of the war was a major reason voters ousted Bush's Republicans from power in Congress in the Nov. 7 elections.

Allies have been urging Bush to talk about Iraq to his adversaries Iran and Syria, but Washington has so far reacted warily to that idea. White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said Tuesday that the administration had no objection to warmer relations among Iraq, Syria and Iran.

Next month Bush is expected to receive recommendations from a bipartisan Iraq study group, and the Pentagon is conducting its own review.

Hadley said Bush will want to hear from al-Maliki, "who's obviously been developing his own ideas on the way forward."

In Baghdad on Tuesday, Syria's foreign minister signed the diplomatic accord, on the first such visit since U.S. troops overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"We have agreed to walk together in measured and quiet steps," said Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari.

Like his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, he stressed the visit was not the result of U.S. pressure: "(It) sends an important message to Arab nations that we are masters of our own decisions ... and did not happen due to an outside will."

Al-Moallem, who has called for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces, agreed they would stay until Iraq no longer wanted them.

Iraq ordered Syrian diplomats out in 1980. Then ruled by rival wings of the Baath Party, the neighbors cut all ties in 1982, when Syria sided with Tehran during Saddam's long war with Iran.

The bloodshed in Iraq showed no sign of abating Tuesday. Iraqi officials said three people were killed, including a child, in a U.S. airstrike on a Shiite stronghold in Baghdad.

The strike was part of a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid that seized seven members of a group suspected of links to the abduction last month of Iraqi-born U.S. soldier Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, a 41-year-old reservist from Ann Arbor, Mich.

He was visiting his Iraqi wife in Baghdad on Oct. 23 when he was handcuffed and abducted by suspected rogue gunmen from the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The U.S. command said Iraqi forces came under fire during the raid, and that U.S. aircraft returned fire.

Al-Sadr is a major backer of al-Maliki, who had rejected U.S. demands to disband the armed militias and their death squads that have carried out revenge attacks on Iraq's Sunni minority in a cycle of violence following the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine.

Al-Maliki, however, looked the other way during the most recent joint U.S.-Iraqi raids, an about-face his aides said was prompted by anger over the U.S. soldier's abduction and a mass kidnapping carried out this month by suspected Mahdi Army gunmen.

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